Q: Hi Steve: I read your column regularly and really enjoyed the one a while back about business jargon. I have a similar gripe: Business clichés. So many of them are either wrong, or just plain dumb. Don’t you agree?

Seth

A: Your question reminds me of that great quote by David Letterman: “There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.” Yes, there sure are a lot of hackneyed business clichés out there, a few of which are true, and many of which are not. Here are my nominees for the worst:

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”: This nice scapegoat phrase, used when things go haywire in the office, is so far from true it is hard to figure out where to start, but try this on for starters: If anything that can go wrong will go wrong, then we would all be depressed, bankrupt, out of business, divorced, ill, or dead.

“Sold out” Frankly, I know very few people who would not jump at the chance to sell out, or at a minimum, at least happy to have something to sell out about. When the Rolling Stones can sell their music to sell cars, you can certainly take that new job without fear of being called a sellout.

“The customer is always right”: Are you kidding me? That jerk haranguing the sweet waitress most certainly is not right. By the same token, the customer does not come first. Employees, spouses, children, shareholders, and investors come first.

“Failure is not an option”: No, it most certainly is an option. It’s called capitalism.

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”: Really? Tell that to my pal who invented a product that was markedly better than anything else out there yet still ended up broke, being sued by his partner, and finally having to sell his business to a competitor because they had the money to execute on his concept and he did not.

“If you build it, they will come”: Similarly, while this was true in Field of Dreams, it’s not in business. Just ask John DeLorean, the folks who brought you Pets.com, and the makers of New Coke.

“We need to think out of the box”: Telling others (never yourself!) that they need to think out of the box has become so commonplace that it is now in the box thinking.

“Grow or die”: Most small businesses are content to not grow a lot, or at all, and they do just fine, thank you very much.

“Nice guys finish last”: In my experience, this couldn’t be more wrong. Nice guys usually finish first, actually.

“Commitment to excellence”: Sure the sentiment is nice, but it usually rings hollow and is untrue. Yes, most of us are committed to doing our very best. Sometimes that is excellent, and sometimes it’s, well, crappy. But very few of us are actually committed to excellence. Even LeBron James only had one excellent game in a 6-game series over the Detroit Pistons. (Go Cavs!)

“Win/win”: Again, this is a perfectly fine sentiment, laudable even, but rarely is it true. In most situations and negotiations, one side will probably get more of what it wants than the other – usually the side with more leverage. But we’ll all smile and say it was a win-win, even if it was really a win-big/didn’t lose quite so bad.

Getting rid of dumb clichés? Mission critical!

Today’s tip: Finally, my biggest linguistic pet peeve, though not a cliché, is this: “Literally” means literally. “Literally” does not mean “really.”